The “war on terror” and the torture regime 1

The images from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad – later supplemented by a flood of previously unreleased photographs ² – have become iconic. Despite attempts by US officials and Bush administration supporters to depict the perpetrators of abuses and atrocities at the prison as a few “bad apples,” or to dismiss their actions as fraternity-house pranks, it is now widely acknowledged that they instead represented the tip of the iceberg. Torture and atrocity, including torture unto death, have been institutionalized in the US sphere during the “war on terror.” They have spread across the globe, proliferated their forms, and expanded in complexity – all in something approaching a legal vacuum. Following the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, rumors swirled, and were rapidly confirmed, of a policy of “extraordinary rendition,” by which the US seized terror “suspects” and transported them to allied countries for the purpose of interrogation under torture. Revelations in late 2005 demonstrated the existence of a network of “ghost flights” and “black sites” across Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. To some commentators, it appeared that practices associated with the Soviet NKVD, and German and Japanese fascists, had been matched or even surpassed by the US in its “war on terror.” ³ As Karen J. Greenberg of the New York University Center on Law and Security has summarized the situation:

At the behest of the government, uniformed servicemen and women, contract interrogators, CIA employees and people in foreign countries have beaten, maimed, sodomized and killed prisoners held in custody. In Afghanistan, in Iraq, at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, prisoners have been kicked and punched, their bones broken. Their heads have been hooded, wrapped in duct tape and smashed. Their flesh has been seared with the chemicals in fluorescent lights. They have been frozen to death, suffocated, hung upside down until dead, starved, electrically shocked and waterboarded. And in few if any of these cases have the victims been individually charged; in none of these instances has evidence, pro or con, been formally presented against the individual subjected to excruciating pain or death. ⁴